Abstract

This article describes the use of heated siliconatomic force microscopy probes to perform local thermal analysis (LTA) of a thin film of polystyrene. The experiments measure film softening behavior with spatial resolution, whereas previous research on LTA used probes that had a resolution near , which was too large to investigate some types of features. This article demonstrates four methods by which heated silicon probes can perform thermal analysis with nanoscale spatial resolution. The polystyrene softening temperaturemeasured from nanoscale LTA techniques is , compared to , measured with bulk ellipsometry. The discrepancy is attributed to the thermal contact resistance at the end of the silicon probe tip, on the order of , which modulates heat flow between the tip and sample and governs the fundamental limits of this technique. The use of a silicon probe for LTA enables bulk fabrication, parallelization for high-throughput analysis, and fabrication of a sharp tip capable of nanoscale spatial resolution.